Even if you organize your files and folders logically, sooner or later you'll need to find somethingnewly installed software, a download, or a file whose location you forgot, for example. Often, you'll also want to find all files that meet certain criteriaall or part of a filename, approximate size, modification date, type, and so on.
Windows' built-in Search Companion can find printers, people, and other computers on your network. In this section, I describe how to find files and folders.
To open Search Companion:
On the desktop, choose Start > Search, press F3, or press Windows logo key+F (Figure 5.45 ).
or
In Explorer, press Ctrl+E, press F3, or click the Search toolbar button, or choose View > Explorer Bar > Search.
Tips
To get rid of the animated dog, click the dog itself; then click Turn Off the Animated Character in the menu that appears.
Windows veterans prefer the Windows 2000-style interface, which offers the same search options without the hand-holding screens. To invoke it, in Search Companion, choose Change Preferences > Change Files and Folders Search Behavior > Advanced and click OK.
To search for a file or folder:
1. In Search Companion, click All Files and Folders (Figure 5.46 ).
2. Enter basic search criteria (Figure 5.47 ):
To search by filename, type the filename or a distinctive part of it in the All or Part of the File Name text box.
To search by text
inside files (which can be slow without indexing), type a distinctive word or phrase in the A Word or Phrase in the File text box.
From the Look In list, choose the drive, folder, or network to search.
3. To narrow this search, click the double down arrows to specify more restrictive criteria (Figure 5.48 ).
4. Click the Search button.
Search Companion lists the matches progressively in the right pane (Figure 5.49 ).
entire search again; it doesn't look in only the current results.)
During the search, which can take seconds or minutes, the Search button turns into the Stop button, which you can click at any time.
5. To open a match's parent folder, right-click it and choose File > Open Containing Folder.
Otherwise, you can treat the results list as you would an ordinary Explorer window. Point to an item for pop-up information, double-click it to open it, drag an item to move or copy it, right-click it for its shortcut menu, click a column heading to sort, and so on.
6. To save the current criteria for repeated searches, choose File > Save Search.
Search Companion creates a .fnd file (by default, in your My Documents folder). To search again, double-click a .fnd file; then click Search.
Tips
Search Companion searches the Recycle Bin too.
The results list sometimes contains duplicate entries for files in your My Documents folder.
You don't have to wait until a search ends before you open or use a file in the results list.
After a search finishes, if you delete a file or folder or change it so that it no longer meets the search criteria, it disappears from the results list automatically (or appears in it if the change meets the criteria).
You can use
wildcard characters to represent one or more filename characters when you don't know what the real character is or don't want to type the entire name. ? substitutes for any single character, and * substitutes for zero or more characters. Type *.do?, for example, to find all files that end in .doc (Word documents) or .dot (Word templates). chapter*.doc finds all Word documents that begin with the word
chapter, followed by any characters (or no characters).
As described in step 2 of "To search for a file or folder," Search Companion lets you search for text
inside files whose contents you remember but whose names you forget. Fortunately, Windows' indexing service accelerates exhaustive string searches (typically by orders of magnitude). Indexing Service, turned off by default, silently and automatically collects information from the documents on your hard drive and compiles a database, or
catalog, of file contents. The tradeoff for slashing search time is that Windows must maintain a catalog file that's about 25 percent of the size of the indexed files.
To turn on Indexing Service:
Tips
Indexing Service indexes only
your documents and shared documents. It ignores other users' documents.
Indexing Service ignores case. Search Companion can't perform case-sensitive searches with the service running.
Indexing Service ignores noise words such as
a,
the,
to, and
be , as well as common pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. You can include these words in the search text, but Search Companion treats them as placeholders rather than literal words.
By default Indexing Service catalogs text files, HTML files (their text only), Microsoft Office documents (Office 95 and later), and internet email and news. Third-party filters can index other types of files too. Adobe's free IFilter indexes PDF files; download it from the Acrobat for Windows section of www.adobe.com/support/downloads. To find other filters, search for
indexing service filters on Google.
For advanced indexing, go to http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=317586, "HOW TO: Optimize Indexing Service Performance in Windows 2000."
If you turn off Indexing Service (by disabling it in Figure 5.50), the indexes remain intact. Delete the indexes to save disk space if you don't intend to use indexing again.
To delete indexes:
1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Services and Applications > Indexing Service.
or
1. Choose Start > Run; type ciadv.msc and then press Enter.
A list of catalogs appears, showing information such as catalog size in megabytes. Each catalog is a different index; most of the time the list contains only one catalog.
2. Right-click the catalog to delete, choose Delete, and then click Yes in the confirmation message.
Exploring Your Computer" earlier in this chapter all have enhanced search features. Some dedicated index-based file finders are blinkx (free; www.blinkx.com), X1 Search ($75 U.S.; www.x1.com), and dtSearch Desktop ($199; www.dtsearch.com).
Google Desktop Search (free; http://desktop.google.com) uses Google's internet search technology to provide a full text search over your email, Office documents, chats, text files, and the web pages that you've viewed. After downloading GDS, you can use Google to search your personal items the way you search the internet (Figure 5.51 ). Microsoft's competing tool, MSN Toolbar Suite (free; http://toolbar.msn.com), places individual search boxes within Outlook, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and the taskbar. Yahoo! offers a free desktop search tool at http://desktop.yahoo.com.
Google Desktop Search doesn't make your home computer's content accessible to Google or anyone else, but if you use a public, workplace, or other shared computer for email, instant messaging, or web searches, the people who follow you on the PC can see your information (such as online purchases) in the files that GDS indexed. A multicolored swirl (
The GDS help page (
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